Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Syna So Pro Is One of This Year's STL 77

The RFT honors the musical acts we love in St. Louis in 2017

This year ​the RFT recognizes ​St. Louis' ​stellar music scene by presenting the STL 77, ​our list of 77 acts who did big things in the last twelve months. From now through June 17, the date of our huge annual music festival ShowcaseSTL, we'll be announcing two ​honorees per weekday on our music blog. For more information on STL 77, as well as the complete lineup for ShowcaseSTL, go here.

Syna So Pro can be a profoundly disorienting experience, especially if you catch the one-woman band behind the moniker doing songs from her current album, Vox, composed entirely for voice. But “voice” sounds so singular, and Syrhea Conaway is so multiple, thanks to her looping pedals — she may start with a simple, spoken “boom boom kick, boom kick,” and soon she’s backed by lush, complexly shifting choral arrangements that include everything from soprano to bass (represented by her own octave-shifted voice). It spins from absurdly ambitious into delightfully unreal with “Fengyang Song,” a Chinese folk song, sung in the Mandarin dialect, that uses syllables and tones you’ve probably never encountered. Live, it’s sometimes like watching one person try to sail a three-masted galleon, but that’s part of the appeal. In seeing the effort, especially when something goes awry, we’re engaged by just how beautifully impossible the task is.